The Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) has announced that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
has donated $215,000 to MIT to develop an economic model to maintain digital
documents within an academic research library.

In partnership with the Hewlett-Packard Co., the MIT Libraries are currently
creating a digital repository named DSpace. Intended to be a working digital
depository, DSpace will collect and maintain the digital intellectual output
of the Institute’s faculty and research staff. The Mellon Foundation grant
to the MIT Libraries will increase understanding of the elements necessary
to an economic model that can sustain DSpace beyond its time as a research
project.

Ann J. Wolpert, MIT’s director of libraries, said: “Digital sustainability
is the next great challenge for research libraries. It is essential that
we gain a better understanding of the economics of maintaining an academic
digital repository. Developing a ‘business’ model for DSpace will make
the digital environment sustainable over time, and will serve to inform
the digital initiatives at other research libraries.”

DSpace is designed to be a sustainable, scalable digital repository
capable of holding the approximately 10,000 articles produced by MIT authors
annually, including a large amount of multimedia content. The repository
will include services not usually provided by the Web, such as access control,
rights management, and flexible publishing capabilities. More information
about DSpace can be found at http://web.mit.edu/dspace.